Changes to This Book

This book has been completely rewritten from the first edition. I dumped the first edition of the book from my laptop's hard drive and started from scratch.

The first edition of this book, ASP.NET Unleashed, was written five years ago when the first version of the ASP.NET Framework was released. Like most developers, I've undergone a number of changes over the last five years.

First, you'll notice that this edition of this book emphasizes web standards much more than the first edition. When I wrote the first edition of this book, I didn't care about web standards. At that time, I assumed that Internet Explorer had won the browser wars and the only thing that mattered was getting pages to work in Internet Explorer.

I was young, stupid, and naive. After the first edition of this book was published, a new browser named Firefox appeared. Everyone, once again, is starting to be concerned with creating cross-browsercompatible websites. The best way to create cross-browsercompatible websites is to follow web standards.

All the code samples in this book were written to conform to both XHTML and accessibility standards. You'll notice that almost all the page layout and formatting is performed with Cascading Style Sheets. Furthermore, the book includes notes on how to use different technologies included with the ASP.NET Framework in a manner that is compatible with web standards.

You'll also notice that the screenshots in this book do not all display Internet Explorer. To emphasize the fact that you can build standards-compliant web pages with ASP.NET, I rotated the screenshots among Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera.

Second, like many developers, I've become obsessed with the topic of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). AJAX enables you to build web applications that more closely resemble desktop applications. By taking advantage of AJAX, you can update content in a web page without posting the page back to the web server.

I was very happy to learn that Microsoft included the basic infrastructure that you need to build AJAX applications as part of the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. AJAX samples are scattered throughout this book. In Chapter 7, for example, you learn how to display different quotations randomly in a page by using AJAX. In Chapter 33 you learn how to insert, edit, and display database records by using AJAX.